Saturday, 7 May 2011

Old School Piano Demo

So I've been messing with Blues in different keys than Cm...

I mean I can play Cm blues with my eyes shut (this may not be a good thing), but its like 90% muscle memory, and 10% creative input from me. On the advice of my piano tutor, I've been experimenting playing them on other keys, Am, Fm, etc. Normally I'd just hit transpose and be done with it, so I'm happy to discover there is a benefit to attempting this, beyond having a few other targets to transpose to.

While noodling around in Fm blues, a phrase came out that sparked off a little nostalgia, it's all caused by the white/black arrangements and how I like to slide off the blacks to get that nice sorta jazz/blues/waterflowing type effect.. of course Fm blues has different alignments for those notes, which then lends itself to the creation of different little patterns to use rather than the Cm familiar ones.

While experimenting with variants of phrasings over the new alignments, I'd started getting the odd flashback to a demo on the Amiga, with lots of spheres rotating on the screen in a vaguely 3d way, where you could alter the parameters used to generate the animation. All the while in the background of this was a piano tune looping round & round drilling down into your subconcious.

Now, I could go power up my Amiga, root through a tonne of Floppy Disks, and hope to discover the one with the demo, or, I wait a few days, and the name 'Piano Plinker' comes to mind, hit youtube, and bam.. here it is. Enjoy... (It's not the original, but the tune's still there.. just as addictive as ever.)